A striking instance of the respective powers of the Committees of asylums and the Commissioners in Lunacy occurs in the Report of the latter for 1870. Death from broken ribs had taken place in a county asylum, and the Commissioners considered the cruelty of an attendant established. They reported inadequate supervision of the wards, as well as the attendants, in reply to which the committee of visitors asserted that they would not enter into any discussion on a subject upon which they considered themselves fully competent to determine how they should discharge their own duties. The Commissioners found that they had no alternative but to leave to the refractory committee the responsibility, which they had shown no unwillingness to assume, of the adoption or rejection of such recommendations. "The law which has required us to investigate and report as to matters affecting the management of county asylums, has invested us with no authority further to enforce our views." In the same way their authority was set at naught in an asylum where an idiot boy was found on the floor, strangled by a pocket-handkerchief, effected, there was every reason to believe, by one of the patients, and the Commissioners found that the deed could not have been perpetrated if attendants had been properly dispersed through the wards. The union authorities failed to get satisfaction from the committee, and the Secretary of State was memorialized by the guardians, who were backed up by the Commissioners, but in vain. Hence the Commissioners complained of "the limits thus placed to all real authority but that of the committee of visitors over establishments whose inmates are necessarily most at the mercy of attendants, and in which these cases of misconduct most frequently occur."[202] We have alluded to this circumstance, not to indicate that at the present time the committees of asylums set themselves in opposition to the recommendations of the Commissioners, but our historical sketch demands, in justice to the latter, who are often supposed to have unlimited power, that it should be known that desirable reforms may not be carried out in our asylums, and yet the fault may not lie at the door of the Lunacy Commissioners. And it should be stated that recently Lord Shaftesbury has publicly expressed his individual opinion that it is better for the views and wishes of the Commissioners to appear in the form of recommendations rather than commands. * * * * *